War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (59 page)

“Thank you for the party,” he said. “It was a surprise.”

“I have more.”

He squeezed her hands. “I’m sure. But now I have a surprise for you. Chuikov thinks the Germans are going to try a breakout soon. Tonight, four hares are going to kill Paulus.”

Tania’s eyebrows went up. “Cut off the head of the Sixth Army and the body will lie still.”

“Exactly. Chuikov asked me to lead the mission.”

Not a mission, Tania thought. An assassination.

“And which three hares are going with you, Vasha? I hope this is my surprise.”

“You’ll be my second in command.”

Zaitsev told her he’d also selected two new hares from the latest sniper class. Tania knew them both. One, a Lithuanian Jew, Jakobsin, tall and slender, had dark skin that seemed to sizzle with electricity when he spoke. He’s a talker, Tania thought, but she’d seen him quiet and mean. He’s strong and can shoot. His eyes, narrow and black, see as straight as crows fly. And a woman, Yelena Mogileva; she’d lived only a hundred kilometers east of Stalingrad on the empty steppe of Kazakhstan. Tania knew little about Mogileva. The woman had said few words during her sniper training. She was skinny, but her hands were big like a man’s, with pronounced tendons and blue veins. Her cropped hair, once jet, was graying. Tania couldn’t guess the Kazakh woman’s age, couldn’t tell much about her at all except that she’d definitely handled a rifle before she was handed one in Stalingrad; she was a good shot and could sit unwavering for hours behind her scope. Mogileva had her own reasons for joining the snipers; whatever they were, Tania hoped they were good enough. Why is she coming? Why do we need two women along on this mission? Vasha’s teaching her, I suppose, the same way he taught the rest of us. I’m pleased Vasha selected me. He’s flattering me, telling me he doesn’t consider me a woman in battle. He wants me near him in danger; he trusts me when the time comes for killing.

Intelligence had pinpointed the German Sixth Army’s command bunker in the downtown sector. Paulus was reported to be holed up in the Gorki Theater at the south end of Red Square.

Zaitsev checked his watch. “After midnight, we’ll each carry two satchel charges. We’ll work our way down the riverbank, then slip past the House of Specialists to the rim of the park. Chuikov said that Paulus’s offices and bedroom are on the western side of the building. We’ll plant the charges at the base of the wall.”

Tania knew the rest. She’d done it all before. They’d light the eight charges, then scurry under cover of the detonation to the icy edge of the Volga.

“That much dynamite,” Tania laughed, making Zaitsev grin, “ought to bring down the house tonight at the Gorki Theater.”

* * * *

SHE WATCHED HIS HANDS SHUFFLING THROUGH THE
canvas backpacks. He checked each for charges, counted the dynamite sticks, and inspected the wires and connections. He was meticulous; his respect for the implements of death was plain.

Her fascination with the Hare’s body moved her, like it had many times. In her mind she saw him naked through his white camouflage uniform. Beneath the faint lantern, his arms and chest were hairless, lean, and blanched as linen. For a short man, his muscles were long; the smooth cords beneath his skin flexed when he set the parcels near the door of the bunker.

“All set.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Where are they?”

She leaned against the cool dirt wall. Jakobsin and Mogileva would come under the blanket in a few minutes. Those moments until their arrival belonged to her and Vasha.

He moved to the opposite wall. He pressed his back against it, as she had. They looked at each other across the bunker, almost mirror images.

“Do you think,” she asked into his eyes, “this will continue?” She reached her hand out and waved it back and forth. “You and me?”

Zaitsev’s jaw worked. He said nothing.

“We’re soldiers. We’re also lovers. The hand does not fit the glove.”

“Are you saying it’s over?”

“I can’t say. I know I’m only truly alive when I’m with you. I know I’m desperate. For love, for revenge, for this to be over, for this to continue. I’m pulled, Vasha, pulled apart, and I can’t make the pieces fit back together.”

Tania lowered her face. The lamplight fell from her cheeks to hide her eyes behind the veil of her hair.

“What I’m telling you, Vashinka, is that I’m scared. I’m lost every second. It was easier before, when all there was inside me was hate. Now the battle is inside me, too, between love and hate, and I’m being torn up just like the city. I don’t know which I want to win; I fight them both. It’s not over. I ... I just had to tell you I don’t know what it is we’ve started.”

Zaitsev walked to her and stopped an arm’s length away. She wanted him to touch her; she wanted him to make the decision for her now, to take one side or the other in the battle and win it.

“It would be beautiful, Tanyushka, to love you forever. To marry and live and work beside you. To teach our children how to shoot like their mother, the partisan.”

She heard him chuckle at her old nickname. She smiled beneath her shadow.

“I don’t know either, Tania. We bathe in each other’s life every night, and in the morning we go out and swim up to our necks in death. It’s strange and twisted and spinning, and I can’t catch it to take a good look at it. All I can do is let time and the fates figure it out, because they’re the only ones who know what’s going on with the world and with you and me.”

Tania raised her head. It would be beautiful, he’d said.

“And what,” she asked, “is it you want?”

Zaitsev seemed to answer the question inside his head first. Approving of the words with a nod, he spoke.

“To love you forever. To never let you go.”

Tania’s breath snatched in her breast.

Zaitsev reached for her hand. He pulled her forward, away from the wall. There is the strength, she thought, in the hand.

So. He loves me. Then he should know me. I will open up to him, this one man.

Smiling close to his lips, she asked, “Do you remember, Vasha, when I said I had more surprises for you?”

His grin curled lasciviously. “Tania, we don’t have time. Not right now.”

“We have time for this one. I should have told you sooner. I was afraid you would send me away, or that Danilov would take me out of the hares. But now I have to tell you. Because of what you just said.”

Zaitsev crinkled his brow. “All right. Tell me.”

Tania pulled back from his grin to gauge all of his face.

“I’m an American.”

She noted no movement of his eyes or his arms around her waist. He stayed impassive, his body stock still; the hunter, she thought, waiting, always waiting.

“No,” he said, “you’re not.”

In English she answered, “Yes, I am, you cute little Siberian. You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”

“Tania, you’re speaking English.”

She returned to Russian. “We do that in America.”

“You’re not American.”

“I am. My parents are Russian. They live in New York now.”

Zaitsev began to swell with this; Tania sensed him on the move, the hunter rising from cover to engage.

“What are you doing here?”

“Fighting.”

“Are you a spy?”

Tania slapped his chest with an open palm. The knives, pistol, bullets on him all rattled.

“No!”

“Then how did you—

Tania bridged his lips with a raised finger.

“When there’s time, Vasha. But you understand why I couldn’t say anything before, and why you have to keep this our secret. If the
politrooks
find out, they’ll make me a hero, just like you, but only in newspapers. They won’t let me fight. Please say it’s all right. Please.”

Zaitsev shook his head. At first Tania thought that he might reject her or the idea that she could be foreign, not Russian. But he made the head shake comic, an overblown gesture, rattling his brains hard, with a smile.

“Yes, Amerikanushka,” he said, feigning dizziness with crossed eyeballs. “Yes, it’s all right.”

He straightened out his eyes and pulled her to him more tightly. “When the war is over, can we go to live in Florida?”

Tania laughed heartily at this.

The sounds of boot steps slipped past the blanket in the doorway. Zaitsev let her go and stepped back. He shrugged. See, he seemed to say, I have to let you go so soon.

No, you don’t, Tania thought. She rose to her toes and thrust her face quickly at him. Just before he could avoid her, just when the blanket lifted, she kissed him with a quiet smack of her lips.

There, she thought. The moment needed to come full circle; it had to be closed with a kiss, even a small one.

She stood quietly, her hands behind her at parade rest while he addressed the two new hares. The tall dark man and the thin woman had come only one step into the bunker. Their faces showed their awe at being included on this foray with the Hare himself.

Zaitsev did not look at her until all four of the snipers had loaded up their rifles and explosive packs. While the two new hares were filing out the bunker door, he mouthed the question “New York?” to her behind their backs. She grimaced at him and mouthed back, “Stop it.” Like this, with serious miens now in place, Zaitsev and Tania walked up beside Jakobsin and Mogileva to go out into the Stalingrad night to assassinate General Paulus.

The four burdened snipers picked their way down the Volga cliffs to the ice. They moved crisply along the high limestone wall. The night was thinned by a wedge of moon shining behind the clouds like a peeking child. Tania imagined the landmarks they passed beneath, checking them off on a memorized city map. The beer factory. The state bank. The House of Specialists, which marked the southern extreme of the Sixty-second Army’s beachhead along the Volga. Ahead one kilometer was the main ferry landing, in German hands now. Tania remembered floating past it clinging to a timber with Fedya and Yuri in the burning river. This night, she returned as a sniper on a secret mission with the famous Hare, who loved her, who never wanted to let her go. Who wanted to live with her in warm, sunny Florida, America.

To her left, gossamer light shimmered on the icy Volga. The river was black and cold. But above and to her right the city cast down a heat like a match held near her cheek. The sticks are still up there, she thought. The city felt as if it were burning, the flames leaping out of its entrails just as they had the first night she’d seen Stalingrad from the opposite bank.

The battle continues here and across Russia, she thought. So long as the sticks live on our soil, there’s still a job of killing to do.

Forget Florida, America.

The hate had ambushed her again. It’s so strong in me, so solid, she thought, surprised how quickly it reared to the surface. The part of me that does not hate is so thin, less than my skin. I can almost stand back and look at the hate. I can describe it, touch it, like a statue inside me. The statue grows; it’s filling me up. The hate has become me. Oh, Vasha, I want ... I want. But the hate is all of me. Every step we take on this ice, every crunch of my boots, I hear the guns, see the bodies jerk and fall, pile upon pile. Will they never stop falling?

The Kazakh woman stumbled ahead of her. The noise laid the whip to Tania’s temper. “Get up,” she mumbled; all the jocularity and tenderness she’d shared with Zaitsev in the sniper’s bunker only an hour before had dissolved.